


timeskip

by junesangie



Category: NCT (Band), SuperM (Korea Band)
Genre: Angst, Car Accidents, Depression, Imagery, M/M, Minimal Time Travel, References to Depression, Spies & Secret Agents, Time Travel, figurative language gets less heavy as time goes on, i got lazy aha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:00:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28804689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junesangie/pseuds/junesangie
Summary: ten is a code, a title plastered over raw beauty and hearty smiles. chittaphon is a name, a lover’s word he can’t help but shield with his life.protecting taeyong is his only priority, and he’ll do anything to keep him alive.
Relationships: Lee Taeyong/Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten
Kudos: 11





	timeskip

**Author's Note:**

> this is going to be a work with inconsistent updates, like all my others. but i hope i can provide some good content!
> 
> warning for the chapter below: it’s very wordy, but the writing in chapters after this will be less school vocab-heavy.

“ _Taeyong!_ ”

It’s the moment he grabs his shoulder, furious at the elder’s stupidity, that he realizes just exactly what he’s done. And instead of colliding—instead of a collection and too many nights of imagining him in the empty space between the sheets—his arms are around Taeyong, pulling back just as the drunken speed of a captain steering straight into an iceberg nearly drags them both to an early grave.

Ten can see the future unraveling before teary eyes, spilling over like the overfull fountain he’s become, and suddenly he knows that this wasn’t the right thing to do. 

Because love is intangible. It isn’t meant to leave you satisfied; you’re supposed to sob and mourn and beg the heavens for another chance when you lose it, and then regret ever allowing unseen claws to tear apart your chest and set the gaping wound like inlaid gold for exposed ribs and quivering lungs. Taeyong is still in his arms, but his body is warm and that’s what he wanted isn’t it? To rescue him, to evade the prophesied demise that would wipe his beloved from the face of the earth, from his grasp for good but never from his heart?

He tastes the sanguineous fluid that will flood his mouth in no time at all. _What breed of bastard outshines his father?_ he hears, but the twitch in his neck doesn’t register until the beat is out of sync, both pulses rapid and irregular in the night’s thinning oxygen. People stare, or they’re going to stop doing so, but the car has sped past too quick to read a plate and no phones are emerging from pockets and bags for a decent reason. He knows what will happen next, how the crunching metal and shattered windows blend with snapping bone. And the reprimand will not be so delicate as a slap on the hand this time. Oh, no. He’s bundled the entire timeline now, all of it tangled wires in the hands of unskilled men, and no one above him will tolerate such blatant defiance of their orders.

They should never have told him. He doesn’t believe the secret would have been enough to stop his actions either way.

“Chitta—” There’s a silence, permeated by his only shuddering exhale, before the explosion of sound is heard from no further than half a mile away. Ten doesn’t flinch, has to restrain himself from untangling a hand from Taeyong’s, praying for relief in that trigger finger twitching like his head. His lover’s eyes go wide, glassy doll irises big and brown and deer-in-headlights fearful of what will be found at the scene only halfway known by ear and by sight.

The name has made warmth blossom in his chest each time it’s used, at breakfast and with friends, in the bed they share while praise and touch are doled so graciously, even when he’s angry and unwilling to release his strain. Now he only shushes him, because that isn’t his name now, not when he’s fucked up so badly that the rewritten future is twisting itself round his throat and choking him out with no need to explain because everyone will know what he’s done. But Taeyong…sweet, precious Taeyong, with his beautiful words and diligent adoration—he can never discover what’s become of him after the injury is suffered after less than the typical struggle. A bar fight, perhaps, he decides as the crowd begins to grow its instinct pack mentality like film over milk, heels and sneakers all pounding cement. No, a street fight. Yes. He was mugged, they stole the money on him because it was all he had.

It’s the only rational explanation he could offer for something so preposterous. After all, the division would spare no trauma if refusal was involved, and by now they’d find any excuse to lock him within that gilded cage too glorified for its grisly reputation. _Disgusting,_ he thinks, but the image of their only living prisoner is a flash-powder image, sparking dreadful remembrance from the past months and sending it to float upon to the surface.

That low, trembling voice tugs him upward like an anchor to the deck again. He’s the only thing that brings Ten home, because he is the only truth known in a cotton-stuffed deafness to kind souls. “Chitta—baby…” He’s still terrified; they need to get home before someone discovers exactly how a spared innocent’s survival has begun a ripple effect that will spread throughout their entire timeline.

“You’re okay.” _Liar,_ someone seethes, as if their voice alone resides in those cobwebbed corridors. Disembodied. Resentful. A second conscience, if he was gifted one to speak of. “Let’s get you home.”

_Why don’t you tell him the truth?_

_Because he’d despise me._ Ten hoists them both to their feet, hold on Taeyong gentle and guiding while he supports the framework of weakened legs and sickly-pale (like dead dove’s feathers) complexion to their car. _Because his heartbeat would edge ever closer to the precipice of mortal danger and if he knows now it will get him killed._

Contemptuous realization hits just as the engine comes to life. 

_Because I couldn’t live with myself if he died._

Aside from the tepid resistance, smothering Ten within lost oxygen, the speed limit met by ten miles below as images of wreckage pierce the quiet. Honey-pomegranate trickling from the split fruit, rotting rapidly, perfumed by the coppery stench of dire injury. Ivory wafers bent and crackling from pressure administered by a higher power—the one destined to steal back his creations, even those too stupid to avoid disaster. 

Widened, glassy eyes stray past the lens in a vivid photograph now pinned to the corkboard curves of his mind. It’s impossible to desecrate the image, and still he refuses to pay it mind for Taeyong isn’t beside him, the rumbling has ceased, it’s freezing and his only reaction is whiplike as he dashes up to their apartment while the car locks seemingly by itself. He won’t recall a thumb on the keys; it’s irrelevant to the grander scheme of collective detail.

Fumbling with the door, Ten still isn’t sure how to explain this—isn’t recalling the cut-and-dry of a manual unwritten on how to explain such an enormous disaster to your fiancé. The manual on how to word that you’re in charge of a minuscule fraction of chosen people, all of which monitor future events and ensure they are followed through with. The most trivial happening can alter so many aspects of everything after; Taeyong’s death is an order his compliance has strayed from, and now that he’s handled such a direction by denial instead of docility, they’ve both plunged into the deep end with heavy, rusted chains. Ones that will pinch and crush their bodies in slow torment before swallowed chlorine gives their bodies enough buoyancy to hover between sinking and drifting carelessly into hell.

Or perhaps that will be him alone. He is a sinner, sly grin and all, despite the irreversible regret.

The bedroom door is still shut, and he can’t stand the thought of Taeyong alone in there, still shaken and clumsily picking through the million thoughts veering on insanity if he refuses to listen to reason. The blazer is stifling, phantom weight of his weapons making him consider reaching for the new expulsor before realizing it’s been confiscated. Just like all the rest of his utilities, and for some reason that’s even more frustrating than recalling what they can do without protection on hand.

He throws himself off the couch and to his feet, composure an irrelevant variable as dark leather once stained by blood carries him down the hall and nearly _into_ the door instead of just beside it. 

“Yongie?” No answer. “Damn it… Yongie, are you in there, baby?”

It’s barely a reply, but the whimper is enough to have him bursting through the door with a force greater than three agents instead of one. His lover, curled beneath the sheets, tangled like a fly in spider silk, is trying to smother panic into the mattress and he doesn’t notice that Ten is kneeling beside him, either chosen or for a badly-timed mistake. The veil is thickened over from shock and by cool fabric that does nothing to ease the burn of his skin. He’s clawing at his arms still, sleeves tugged up and keratin digging into flesh healing the worst of near-invisible wounds. Ten can’t see, but he knows the way trauma reverts us back to our old ways; reopens our old injuries. It’s agonizing, becoming a child in their protective shell of naïveté while the world begins to crumble around you, but he’s learned to become granite and steel in the face of his past.

Taeyong, he sees, pushing back the blankets to see sweat and saline and hiccuping sobs, still has a ways to go.

“I’m sorry…” 

And he doesn’t waste a moment in taking him in both arms once more, crawling beneath the sheets like the creature of night that he is, heart spilling ashy water that leaves a smoky taste back behind his tongue. He pries the fingers back, razors if bitten close enough, folding them in his palm and wishing now that an expulsor was in his possession so the signs would scatter. Compact beneath his shoes, swept out into the night they’ve never truly managed to escape from. Why can’t he _protect_ him?

“It’s okay.” It’s not. Nothing living nothing dead, absolutely no single phrase or chain of such can remove the nightmarish twisting of his guts, churning and charring behind his navel, magma readying to spout if he thinks too hard about how these markings came to be. At least they aren’t new, for he knows living with the fact would take acid to eat away at him faster and more efficiently than volcanic agony ever has. “Just breathe, okay?” Lips are mouthing the directions to a story that has, in fact, been printed since the birth of a universe, and he’s rounding his spine to slot behind Taeyong, shards of delicate glass from the same flute that too perfectly stand alone. His hair is damp, temple soaking, but the waters are too deep for anyone else to reach beneath. Ten is the anomaly in this equation, all variables failed except himself, the single constant Taeyong and his wavering state of mind. But he still hasn’t relented for the collectors yet, and though the suffering may seem unbearable from the outer shell, Ten is unable to strip so many layers into the baseline of raw and destructive emotion. “Breathe for me.”

He calls him _good boy, sweet boy_ , as if he’s a puppy instead of the man he’s going to marry, but this is what calms him and while unusual it’s not a shameful request at all. The leash is slackened most days, though it tightens on rare occasion, kindling from the fire devouring nourishment of countless memories all too gory, relief blossoming by paths of veins and steel he’s too far down to turn away from. _You’re safe, baby. I’m here._ The words can’t be what he considers enough, each one generic, scripted into the empathetics’ code and written irresponsibly by whomever forms bodies and consciousness in this world. Taeyong doesn’t seem to mind as he keens, deep and desperate, tilting back into Ten’s shoulder, pretty eyes shut tight and dew sparkling about his hairline. It’s still clear how much it hurts.

Ten decides, then, scalding tears a burden inequivalent to his lover’s own, to save himself, too. Neither could survive privation of the other’s tender touch. He may leap at the opportunity of proving himself, but there is a single life worth more than all those he shall risk and it is risen of benevolence, driven by the promise of tomorrow with someone he adores. Taeyong is the peaceful dove, docile and treasured, and Ten is the crow, known to steal and named in gatherings for too violent an end. 

They are a balance, praise and pride interchangeable for the first or second. And it is an act he is determined to weave a safety net beneath.


End file.
